Sport, the secret weapon against racism?
27 December 2024
This article comes from the anti-racist fanzine ‘A Sporting Chance’, created by the ERRC in 2024 to highlight the experiences of Roma, Sinti, & Travellers fighting racism through sport as part of the EU-funded Moving On project.
Let’s start with the obvious – we should all be doing more sport and exercise. For Roma, Sinti, and Travellers, who overall live significantly shorter and more unhealthy lives than the rest of society, this is especially true.
The health benefits of sport have discussed and included in the realm of public policy for decades. The initial outlay to provide sports infrastructure to make a healthier, sportier population is peanuts compared to the costs of treating unhealthy, un-sporty people through our underfunded health systems. There is also a familiar argument that has been made in favour of the mental health benefits derived from sporting activity, with numerous studies linking regular physical activity to decreases in the suicide rate (which is up to seven times higher for Romani and Traveller communities).
But beyond health and wellbeing, I argue that sport can genuinely be used as a tool of anti-racism. Not in the kumbaya, Olympic vision of fraternal international relations kind of way – I mean actual anti-racism, at a local level where it can bring communities together.
“But how can sport be used as a tool of anti-racism”, you ask?
Sport has the power to change minds. In part through the sickly liberal dream of ethnic minority role-models; where successful racialised sportspeople are put on an impossibly high pedestal to break down barriers with the majority population and encourage participation in sports from their community. But this relies on too many variables to succeed all the time. Not to mention it also exposes those role models to all sorts of horrible abuse in their personal life.
No, sport has the power to change minds mostly through the banal encounters that sport brings week-in, week-out for those who do it. It’s the changing rooms, the shared bus-journeys, paying club fees (and not being able to afford club fees), the cleaning of equipment, the team WhatsApp groups, arranging practices, injuries, wins, and losses.
At a professional level, players from racialised minority groups don’t necessarily have to be wildly successful role models. They just have to be visible and get on with their job. The longer they do that, the more they normalise their community’s participation in that sport.
Of course, these experiences, whether at amateur or professional level, do not materialise over-night. Local authorities, sports associations, and schools have a great deal of say on the conditions that sport happens in. In many countries, the racial segregation between the haves and the have-nots is so wide that real work needs to be put in before you can get to the boring stuff that builds racism-resistant relationships between people.
So, how do we build anti-racist sports programmes?
Research (and common sense) seems to say that the way to do this well is by getting Roma, Sinti, & Travellers involved right from the very beginning. “Inclusion programmes” is often such a loathsome phrase for racialised communities because it sounds like society is stooping down to their level and doing them a big favour by deigning to include them. It ignores the years of ex-clusion that led to this point in the first place.
When Romani and Traveller people own their own access to sport projects, when they design them themselves, when they are the primary contact with communities, then you get genuine dialogue which acknowledges the barriers and attempts to create the conditions for equal access to sport and sport facilities in a dignified way. No one wants to feel like a charity case. Especially when the charity being offered is what everyone else gets for free but without the feeling of humiliation and the burden of putting up with smug, condescending inclusion successes and best practices.
There’s also the seldom-spoken-of notion that, generally speaking, inclusion projects by white people in positions of power are very rarely…cool. It’s difficult to put your finger on, but some combination of the veneer of boring, besuited respectability and projects dreamt up by middle-class bureaucrats that attempt to resonate with urban (read, ethnic) youth never come off well. Racialised minorities tend to form their own cliques, codes, and subcultures as part of a defence mechanism against racism. In sport, in music, or in fashion these groups often have tastes and preferences entirely apart from that of the majority population (in some cases, often ending up being trend setters for the majority). Projects or policies which seek to improve access to sport and sporting infrastructure for these groups do better when they are not just couched in the language and culture of the ethnic group but are actually designed and informed by the people from that group. These actions are not only more successful at improving the number of people participating in sport, but they also project a change in narrative away from victimhood and instead depict something of cultural value to the rest of society.
Sport doesn’t create racism, racists do!
Sport does not create racism (contrary to some popular beliefs about football). It may reflect racist attitudes but, as a practice in and of itself, sport does not promote racism. In fact, it tends towards the opposite. The idealist’s vision of sport (not necessarily the reality) is one of pure meritocracy in success and failure, and egalitarianism in participation. While the real world often encroaches on the sporting one and ruins this utopian vision, we can still try to put in practice these sporting ideals that uphold values of anti-discrimination and equality. Like any field of human endeavour, the origin of discrimination and racial inequality in sport lies in structural racism in our society. Problems arising in sport cannot be tackled in isolation. The best anti-racist sport policies in the world cannot solve the political issues of segregation and exclusion. Addressing structural racism requires structural solutions, not just dealing with superficial expressions of discrimination. This means things like building social housing and ensuring an equitable allocation to everyone who needs it, it means police reform, legal aid, childcare services, funding a social welfare net with provision to mitigate creeping institutional racism, and a root and branch overhaul of education systems to fully commit to desegregation. In short, basic things which allow society to function in an equitable way. If we did this, it wouldn’t end racism. But it might give Roma, Sinti, & Travellers a sporting chance to go to work, go to school, to go to the gym, to play a bit of sport, and to get on with living a normal life.
